When it comes to political analysis, there are few who are as offbase as Jerusalem Report founder and senior columnist Hirsch Goodman. Goodman, after all, is the guy who wrote in an October 2000 issue that even if peace talks fail, Israel and the Palestinians would never go back to a state of war because on an individual level, the people had come to respect and like each other. By the time the issue reached mailboxes, Yasser Arafat had launched the Palestinian terror war and Israelis who ventured into cities under Palestinian control were invariably lynched or shot.

Last year, Goodman predicted that religious IDF soldiers would, en masse, refuse orders to evacuate the Gaza settlements, and try to take over the IDF. Goodman was especially concerned since, as he put it, the religious comprise around one-third of IDF combat soldiers. Needless to say, no such mutiny occurred.

So it was especially troubling to read Goodman's complete dismissal - in his column in the latest issue of The Jerusalem Report - of the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel. Goodman's premise is that it's not that big a deal if Iran acquires nukes, because it would never dare use them against Israel. He offers a few reasons why any rational actor would refrain from nuking a military power like Israel.

I read Goodman's piece a few days ago and thought he was off the wall. Since when are the crazies in Iran rational? And as if further proof of this were necessary, yesterday's statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map", should more than suffice.